Day Eleven: A long way from home

Today was Day Eleven, and we woke up feeling something we hadn't felt since we left Southern California. We were too hot. The heater in our Ramada room that had been so welcome when we trekked in from curling last night now choked the air and the window to the indoor pool was adding humidity to the whole mess. I took a shower, woke up Mike and began to pack as the weariness of two overly long days of driving began to creep through my body. And I was exhausted already thinking about another day on the road. Another day leading away from warmth, away from home, and into god knows what.

An odd thing about this road trip is how quickly we become attached to places. We wake up just about every morning fighting the desire to just unpack our suitcases and stay. It doesn't matter if we're in someplace amazing or someplace utterly not. The desire to sleep two nights in the same place is almost overwhelming. Then we get in the car and back on the interstate and we start watching the miles tick away and then the bug's in us again and we're slapping the dashboard, yelling at bad drivers, counting the exits as they get higher and higher then drop back down to Exit 1 when we cross a state line. And suddenly we can't wait to go to sleep somewhere entirely new, washing the dirt of five hundred cities off with a heavy Midwestern storm. And we can't wait to see what our home is going to look like tonight.

And yes, we loved San Francisco. And we loved Portland and Seattle, and I can almost taste the clear scent of the redwoods every time I see one of these leafless trees with roots still buried in ice. Someday we'll be home, and then we'll love Long Beach most of all. And right now we're loving Eau Claire, Wisconsin because there's a king bed here and we're in it. But tomorrow we'll wake up and there's going to be a lot more road to explore. And we'll leave Eau Claire, seat of the county and home of the Domino's pizza man who brought us the first hot food we'd had all day. We'll leave her early in the morning, snow and ice covering her silent streets and we'll start counting down to the Illinois border. To that sweet Exit 1 and to whatever comes next.

Another day. Another day. Another day. This one was filled with statues of literary heroes (of F. Scott Fitzgerald and of the whole Peanuts gang) and thousands of frozen lakes. We weren't long in St. Paul today before the rain and the snow drove us eastward, but boy we loved it too.

And today, on Day Eleven, we met a homeless vet in St. Paul who gave us directions and took all the coins we had to give. And he graduated from Long Beach Jordan High School, just a few miles from where Mike and I met. And he was standing at a five-way intersection in Minnesota, beard down to his chest and cardboard sign soaked with rain, hoping someone would be brave enough to catch his eye. He is a long way from home today.

Listened to: "Wagon Wheel" by OCMS, On the Road, Colin Meloy Sings Live (Colin Meloy), and the pat of snow on our windshield and the squeak of the wipers rushing to respond.

Mystery words: "We do cows"

Read Mike's words using your eyes and your brain (and your typing fingers?): astoriedyear.blogspot.com